Tagsecurity

October 6, 2015

Peeple, Security and why hiding reviews doesn't matter

By laura

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06October

There’s been a lot of discussion about the Peeple app, which lets random individuals provide reviews of other people. The founders of the company seem to believe that no one is ever mean on the Internet and that all reviews are accurate. They’ve tried to assure us that no negative reviews will be published for unregistered users. They’re almost charming in their naivety, and it...

April 27, 2015

Compromises and phishing and email

By laura

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27April

Earlier this month, Sendgrid reported that a customer account was compromised and used for phishing. At the time Sendgrid thought that it was only a single compromise. However, they did undertake a full investigation to make sure that their systems were secure. Today they released more information about the compromise. It wasn’t simply a customer account, a Sendgrid employee’s...

April 14, 2015

A series of tubes

By laura

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14April

The Internet and pundits had a field day with Senator Stevens, when he explained the Internet was a series of tubes. I always interpreted his statement as coming from someone who demanded an engineer tell him why his mail was delayed. The engineer used the “tube” metaphor to explain network congestion and packets and TCP, and when the Senator tried to forward on the information he got...

March 27, 2015

We're all targets

By josh

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27March

Last week, another email provider announced their systems had a security incident. Mandrill’s internal security team detected unusual activity and took the servers offline to investigate. While there’s no sign any data was compromised or servers infiltrated, Mandrill sent an email to their customers explaining the incident was due to a firewall rule change. Email service providers are a...

February 23, 2015

Back from M3AAWG

By laura

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23February

Last week was the another M3AAWG meeting in San Francisco. The conference was packed full of really interesting sessions and things to learn. Jayne’s keynote on Tuesday was great, and brought up a lot of memories of just what it was like to be fighting spam and online abuse in the mid to late 90s. It’s somewhat amazing to me that many of the people I first met, or even just heard...

January 2, 2015

December 2014: The month in email

By laura

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02January

2014 has been a busy and exciting year at Word to the Wise (look for more on that in a year-end wrap-up post next week!) and this month was particularly thrilling for us as we officially doubled our size with the addition of Josh and Meri on our client services team. If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ve probably spotted Josh’s byline on a few posts: Google’s Inbox Team answers questions...

October 1, 2014

September 2014: The Month in Email

By laura

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01October

September was another busy month for us, but Steve stepped up and wrote a number of really interesting posts on email history, cryptography, and current technical issues in the email landscape. We started the month with a look at the various RFCs that served as the technical specifications for developing message transfer protocols in the 1970s. It’s really fascinating to look at the evolution of...

June 2, 2014

May 2014: The month in email

By laura

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02June

It’s been a busy and exciting month for us here. Laura finished a multi-year project with M3AAWG, the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (look for the results to be published later this year) and continued working with clients on interesting delivery challenges and program opportunities. Steve focused on development on the next version release of Abacus, our flagship abuse...

April 28, 2014

AOL admits to security breach

By laura

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28April

According to Reuters AOL has admitted there was a breach of their network security that compromised 2% of their accounts. Users are being told to reset their passwords, and security questions. AOL started investigating the attack after users started reporting an uptick in spam from aol.com addresses. This spam was using @aol.com addresses to send mail to addresses in that user’s address...

April 21, 2014

AOL compromise

By laura

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21April

Lots of reports today of a security problem at AOL where accounts are sending spam, or are being spoofed in spam runs or something. Details are hazy, but there seems to be quite a bit of noise surrounding this incident. AOL hasn’t provided any information as of yet as to what is going on.